Well I broke the cardinal rule of taking things slow and went coral crazy over the last month.
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I'm sure it'll bite me sooner or later but so far so good. Nothing is cemented down yet just glued to bits of live rock rubble, and some will find new homes as they grow, but for now it's been great having so much color and movement. Lost most of a goldeneye chalice that came in looking a little iffy, was fine for week, then quickly started to skeletonize. I threw it in total shade before it was all the way gone and it's starting to color up again so hopefully it pulls through. A couple sps were shedding bits of zooxanthellae about a week ago so I lowered the Kessil intensity to 45% from 50% and they seem to have stopped, nothing else has reacted negatively to it so far. Otherwise everything else is visibly growing and seems to be doing well, around 25 pieces. Doser is doing its job keeping things steadily at 10/425/1470 Alk/Ca/Mg. Colors look good except for a couple purple/blue pieces that have faded a bit, so I'm going to start checking iodine and potassium and dose those as needed. Greens yellows oranges reds and pinks all seem to be doing well though. Shout out to
World Wide Corals who have so far supplied everything in there, though I do have a surprise pack coming from Adam at BattleCoral that I'm super excited for. Anyway fingers crossed, so far so good, do as I say not as I do, etc.
Stars aligned in such a way that I received my artfully acrylic lid a couple weeks ago and had to take down my very fancy fish-bagger-drilled-full-of-holes refugiums, and after about a week started to notice bits of algae and diatoms coming back and nitrates creeping up from around 5-10 to 25-50. Then my stock ATO float switch broke and confirmed what others have said about it being untrustworthy.
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How that happens I can't imagine but I started just adding 1/3 gallon of fresh water on a timer 3x/day. Salinity doesn't move and I'm able to keep my water level a bit higher in the return chamber, and while Christmas will likely see a real ato system for now it works fine. And it also freed up the stock ATO container to replace the fish bagger fuges!
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Drilling glass for the first time was a bit nerve-racking but it came out pretty clean. Soft plumbing definitely doesn't look as clean as all those sexy Reefers in the big thread but there's an upside in being able to move things around relatively quick and easy. Fuge has been up 2 days and DT is starting to clear, and now that none of my CUC have died in 2 months I'll probably supplement it a bit as well. Still just rocking 7 trochus 5 Nass and 4 small hermits.
I also don't scrape my glass as often as I might since one it doesn't bother me and two it gets covered by pods, who are then enjoyed by this little guy!
Been in over a month and while not eating frozen foods he seems to be thickening up on pods and the occasional dumping of baby brine shrimp, which I've been cultivating twice a week. I think the nature of my rock does a lot to keep the pod population up too, the whole left half of my tank is essentially a "pod pile" and I had lots of extra rubble and smaller pieces to strew around to give them hiding places out in the open. Anyway so far so good again.
In sad news the original royal gramma didn't make it after the third day. A second one went in about a month ago and has been doing well though, if not been a bit of a bully, and occasionally he'll snag an almost-too-big amphipod that thought it was safe to come out of an empty hermit shell before dark, which is a fun battle to watch. Dudes got teeth though, so the end is usually the same.
The basslet is still going strong at least, and there's a purple firefish rounding them out for now.
So that about catches it up, assuming in another month or two everything is going strong I'll probably do a third and possibly last batch of fish, anthias and a wrasse being considered, but at this point not much else left to add. Not what you want to be saying 3 months in I'm sure :)
